Structuring the Unstructured: A Systematic Review of Text-to-Structure Generation with a Universal Evaluation Framework

Zheye Deng, Chunkit Chan, Tianshi Zheng, Wei Fan, Weiqi Wang, Yangqiu Song


Abstract
The evolution of AI systems toward agentic operation and context-aware retrieval necessitates transforming unstructured text into structured formats like tables, knowledge graphs, and charts. While such conversions enable critical applications from summarization to data mining, current research lacks a comprehensive synthesis of methodologies, datasets, and metrics. This systematic review examines text-to-structure techniques and the encountered challenges, evaluates current datasets and assessment criteria, and outlines potential directions for future research. We also introduce a universal evaluation framework for structured outputs, establishing text-to-structure as foundational infrastructure for next-generation AI systems.
Anthology ID:
2026.aacl-long.205
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4533–4561
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.205/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zheye Deng, Chunkit Chan, Tianshi Zheng, Wei Fan, Weiqi Wang, and Yangqiu Song. 2026. Structuring the Unstructured: A Systematic Review of Text-to-Structure Generation with a Universal Evaluation Framework. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4533–4561, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Structuring the Unstructured: A Systematic Review of Text-to-Structure Generation with a Universal Evaluation Framework (Deng et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.205.pdf